If I polled people, myself included, as to whether they were taught to recognize and successfully navigate their emotions, they would all likely answer the same — “No way.” In fact, children and adults are still trained to suppress rather than express emotion. The evidence is present in such statements made to young males as — “Boys don’t cry” or to adult women — “If you want their respect, don’t let them see your tears.”

Effective businesses organize around what is considered valuable and call this their value proposition. So, it is not a huge leap for global society to recognize the significance of organizing around what it deems as valuable. The question remains, “What universally shared values are foundational for the prosperity of people and planet?” Answering this question has everything to do with accepting that our emergent experience constitutes a New Normal, and a good deal of the uncertainty experienced in this New Normal is attributable to the shifting nature of our values.

There comes a time in one’s wisdom journey through life where healing personal wounds is outgrown and replaced by a concern for the collective wounding of the planet and humanity at large. These shared or universal wounds — poverty, pollution, oppression/terrorism — are stored in the deepest grooves of the human brain and, overtime, negatively altered our DNA passing from generation to generation in their groundswell of enmity.